Podcast 024 Transcript

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To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 024 page.

[Intro music]

Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here along with my co-host, David Blatner. Say howdy, David.

David Blatner: Howwww-DY!a

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s how they talk up there in Seattle. David and I are the authors of InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, more InDesign solutions then you can shake a stick at. We both live and breathe Adobe InDesign basically with our books and seminars, et cetera, but we don’t work for Adobe so we can tell it like it is, or how it should be. You can learn more about us at our website indesignsecrets.com.

David: Also don’t forget we have a listener comment line now at (206) 888-INDY (4639) so just call us and leave a message.

Anne-Marie: Coming up on today’s show, David is going to tell us about the London InDesign conference this week which just wrapped up, and we’re going to listen in on some great InDesign tips that you recorded from the speakers of the conference. And my favorite tip is Sandee Cohen’s experience taking Ole Kvern’s scripting class, InDesign Scripting. I’m looking forward to that one. We’re going to explore the mysteries and hidden treasures of the Align palette, and the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week eek eek eek is… [David laughs] … What?

David: I’m sorry I always like it when you eek eek eek. It’s like a mouse coming out, an obscure little mouse. The obscure InDesign Feature of the Week is Go Forward and … Go Back.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. I thought you were going to say, Go Forward and … multiply!

[Laughter]

David: Go Forward, multiply and then come back.

Anne-Marie: That would be a good one.

David: There ya go.

Anne-Marie: All right, so tell us about the London conference.

David: Well the conference was great. We had a great time. We were in the Kensington area of London and we had 60-70 people per day. It was sort of a little bit different then the conferences we held before. They were basically a series of one-day seminars as it were but we had a bunch of different speakers including Nigel French and Branislav Milic from Brussels and Rufus Deuchler from Italy and Sandee Cohen and I flew over from the states. Also Ole Kvern flew over. It was great; we had a very good show, all sorts of people.

In fact, Dave Saunders, scripting guy extraordinaire, also came over for the conference. He just happened to be there, he was there for a family wedding so he dropped on in. SO it was good. That’s the kind of thing that I really enjoy about these shows. You know, sort of whoever’s around comes in and we have a lot of good time talking. And it’s nice because of the small show we could all have a really informal time with the speakers. So everybody got to sit around and have lunch together and talk, not just the speakers but the attendees, too. So that was fun, lots of good tips and tricks. We’re going to here some of those tips coming up a little bit later on the podcast.

But it was a good show all around, and the weather held up. The roof gardens in London, oh my goodness. Wonderful. Right in the middle of London there’s flamingos, ducks. Little baby ducks were running around. It was kind of a really magical little place to do a show. So that was great.

Let’s see. I will point out you mentioned Sandee took the scripting class. We had these great speakers doing all the sessions but Sandee said, “You know, I have to learn scripting.” She has been not an opponent of scripting but has certainly been concerned about scripting and her ability to script for years now. It’s been amusing. So I was really amused, really kind of astonished when she said, “No, I’m going to sit in on Ole Kvern’s scripting class. I want to learn this once and for all. I got to learn what’s scripting is about.” So I recorded her before the session and then at the break after. I think you should listen to this just to show the general progression of what happens when people learn scripting.

Anne-Marie: [Laughs] Excellent. I feel for her. I mean that’s how I feel about it. I want to learn it. I want to learn it.

David: Do you have a renewed sense of hope that you might be able to learn scripting now?

Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely.

David: It is all possible but the important thing and Ole mentioned this a number times, that you don’t actually have to learn how to script in order to use scripts. So we have a bunch of scripts at indesignsecrets.com and we’re going to be posting many, many more that people can use even if you don’t want to go over that hump and learn how to script yourself. You can still use those scripts. So that was fun. It was a good show all around.

Anne-Marie: All right. Excellent. So let’s discuss the Align palette. I think the first thing that we should mention about the Align palette is where is the palette? Because you look at the window menu, and it ain’t there.

David: It’s infuriating.

Anne-Marie: It is hiding in Object and Layout. It’s Align and its Shift-F7 and I get so aggravated looking for it that I just saved it as part of my default workspace, I mean in my own workspace.

David: That’s a good idea.

Anne-Marie: So I always keep the Align palette tucked off on the left side of the screen because I use it so often.

David: Really? That’s interesting. I guess I tend to use it but not that often because I use the Align buttons in the Control palette now. One of the things I find a lot of users completely overlook is that most of the important align features, align palette features, are now in the control palette. So as soon as you select two or more objects on your page, boom, all of a sudden you’ve got those features in the control palette. That’s where I like using most of those. On the other hand, there are a few secret things in the align palette you can only get, easily at least, in the align palette itself.

Anne-Marie: Such as the incomprehensible reason why they would hide in the align palette menu, Show Options.

David: I know this is one of the silliest things.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. You choose Show options and one little dinky thing opens. I mean, what’s the point of that?

David: I know. There’s a lot of things that Adobe hides from us and the only way you can see them is if you choose more options. If you know to say, “more options” and this is one of the things that everybody, everybody should go to the align palette, turn on “show more options” and, as Sandee Cohen is fond of saying, “Look, you paid for it.” See it? You should get it.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And the option that it shows is distribute spacing, which I use far more often than “distribute objects”. “Distribute objects” shows by default, and that’s where you can select a bunch of items and you choose one of the distribute commands. All it does is distribute the space from a corner of them, I guess, equally. So if they’re different sizes then they don’t look distributed. If you have a multiple selection of items that are different sizes and shapes, you need to use distribute spacing, which is only available by choosing “show options” from the Align palette menu.

David: Right. “Distribute objects” things, which shows up in the Align palette by itself, as you pointed out, only makes sense, in my mind, when you have a bunch of objects that are exactly the same size.

Anne-Marie: Right. Like a bunch of squares marching down the left-hand side of the page or something like that. And you want the same amount of space in between them as long as they’re exactly the same shape and size or the same length, well the same bounding box I guess. Then that would work. But for everything else, like if you just have a bunch of objects and you want 1-inch of space in between them then you probably want to use “distribute spacing.” And if you want 1-inch of spacing then you should turn on that checkbox where it says “use spacing” and type in one inch or six picas or whatever it is you’re using.

David: Yeah, that “use spacing” feature, I also find that’s a little bit cryptic. It’s like distribute spacing, use spacing, what is that about? But if you have two objects and you want there to be exactly 20 millimeters between them, you open up Align, make sure “show options” is turned on so you can distribute spacing. Turn on “use spacing,” type 20 millimeters in that little field and then click on either the horizontal spacing or the vertical spacing button and you’ll get exactly 20 millimeters between them. So it’s very, very useful. I use this all the time, actually, not for adding more space but having zero space between objects. Sometimes I want two objects to be aligned right against each other so I just set “use spacing” to zero and click on it vertically or horizontal and, yeah, I really like that.

Anne-Marie: Cool! And if you don’t turn on “use spacing,” what happens? Say you’re using the second icon, which is distribute horizontal space. So you’re trying to space things out horizontally, you select them and you click on that little icon. If you don’t turn on the “use spacing” check box, it looks at the entire measure, keeps the leftmost object where it is, keeps the rightmost object where it is and then divvies up the spacing among all the other objects.

David: Right. It’s very clever that way. And same thing with the icon on the left. The vertical distribute, spacing vertically, it’ll keep the top and the bottom object exactly where they were and distribute all the other ones. You know, that said, it does remind me of something I wanted to point about the “align objects” features because a lot people don’t realize if you have, let’s say, three objects selected on a page and you say align along the left edge. Which two are going to move and which one is going to stay still?

Generally if you have three objects selected and you click “align left” then the one that’s farthest to left will stay where it was and the other ones will move to it. If you say “align right” then the rightmost one will stay and they’ll all move over. But sometimes you have one maybe the one in the middle and you want the other ones to align to it, along the left or the right edge or top or bottom or whatever. How do you keep that one stationary and have everything else move to it? Anne-Marie?

Anne-Marie: You select that object and then you go to the object menu and choose lock position or press Command/CTRL-L. You can still select something that’s locked; it’s just the position that’s locked, you can’t drag it around. So you select all the objects including the locked thing and then choose an Align icon. Click on it, and then everything will align to that locked object.

David: Yeah. I love that. It’s sort of an obvious thing once you’ve seen it once or twice. But for many of coming from the Quark XPress world, we never even think that way because A) QuarkXPress locking was so broken and B) because “space align” was just so screwy in QuarkXPress. But in InDesign it really works kind of intuitively. Just lock what you want locked and everything else will move to it. I love that. It’s great.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s great. And if you lock two or more items that are in different positions, then you select all of them including those multiple locked items …

David: It’ll explode.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It does. Just tried and there’s smoke coming out of the back of my computer. [Laughter] No, now they align themselves … it looked like with the last one that I locked. I don’t know if that’s the real answer but I just wanted to give it a shot to see if it really would explode.

David: I’m going to have to try that. I don’t think I’ve ever tried that.

Anne-Marie: I like to push the envelope. What’s nice is that it doesn’t say, “Aaaah, I unexpectedly quit!” or something like that, [Laughter] which I wouldn’t be surprised if it did as well. You know, one other thing that people should remember with this little align and distribute feature is that you can do the same thing with guides.

David: Oh yeah.

Anne-Marie: Say there are three horizontal ruler guides that you created, and you’d like them all spaced 1-inch apart. You can select all three of them and then choose distribute spacing, use spacing 1-inch and click that first icon which is distribute vertical space and they’ll align.

David: Great point. Guides are objects in InDesign so you can any of these kinds of things to guide as you would do to regular objects. Really good point. I love that. What about if you wanted to align something to the page instead of just another object. Like you want to align, center something in the middle of the page. Can you do that?

Anne-Marie: Well, there’s no menu item for it. There’s no icon for it. It’s an often requested feature for InDesign because everybody wants it to work like how Illustrator works, because Illustrator has that feature.

David: Yeah. There’s a script though. There’s a script that comes with InDesign. It’s not installed automatically. We’ll put a link to it or we’ll put a link to where you can get it in the show notes. But if you download it you can just align to the page or align to the margins. I think it’s just called a “line-to” or “line-to guide”….

Anne-Marie: It’s called “align to page.” I have it here.

David: “Align to page.” There we go.

Anne-Marie: Select something, double click the script, and you can align vertically, horizontally and you can include the “consider page margins.”

David: Yeah. So like you could center an object or group of objects in the middle of the page vertically but then left align it to the left margin, let’s say, where ever the left margin is. So it’s really quite clever. I’m hoping that we’ll see that in future versions of InDesign but the align to page is a great script to have.

One other quick trick if you really wanted to center an object on a page then the fast way to do that is to select the object and cut it to the clipboard and then go to “fit in window” command or ctrl-0, and then paste. Because whenever you paste, the object is always pasted right into the middle of the window and if you’re in “fit in window” mode then the object gets pasted in the middle of the screen which just happens to be the middle of the page as well.

Anne-Marie: It’s not mathematically precise though.

David: No it’s sometimes a little bit off.

Anne-Marie: Off by a micron.

David: But yeah we’re talking like a tenth of a point off. There’s a little bit of rounding error sometimes but it’s….

Anne-Marie: You can mathematically center something via using the map controls in the position fields.

David: There are all kinds of ways to center something. You could do that, you could select the object, put the proxy point right in the middle and then in the x and y coordinates, divide the page width in half and divide the page height in half.

Anne-Marie: So like in the X field, 8.5 inch slash 2, which would center exactly half the width and then in Y, 11 inch slash 2, exactly half the height.

David: Exactly.

Anne-Marie: That’s ubergeek. That’s too much for me. I like to just cut and paste.

David: The cut and paste, at least it’s fast, it’s quick and it works. But the script is even better because the script puts it exactly where you want it and it’s very, very easy. And, again, remember, like we learned, you don’t have to know how to script in order to run a script. You just double click on it and there you go. You’re off to the races.

Anne-Marie: We have a real nice little blog entry too at indesignsecrets.com. If you click “plugins and scripts” we made an entry long ago that says how to install scripts. So if you’re not sure how to actually get them in there, it’s very simple. So take a look at indesignsecrets.com.

David: Now with that, let’s listen to a couple other tips that came out of the InDesign Conference in London. First, Branislav Milic and then Rufus Deuchler are going to give us their tips that they wanted to share with the InDesign Secrets audience.

Anne-Marie: Well those are great.

David: Yeah. That’s important stuff, very important lessons. And there’s always more to learn about InDesign. That’s what I love about this software, there’s always more to learn.

Anne-Marie: I love how a student taught Branislav how to do that. That happens to me all the time. You know, I remember one time I was teaching an InDesign class and they were working with very shallow text frames, like a text frame maybe a 1/3 inch of or 1/2 inch high, and when you do that you lose the side handles. The handle on the left and the handle on the right are the inport and the outport for threading text frames. So I was just about to tell them “Now when this happens you’ve got to zoom in so you can grab the side handle.” And I was watching one gal and she just dragged on that inport on the lefthand side and it worked like a side handle.

David: [Laughs] Right. Exactly.

Anne-Marie: So cool. I go, “That’s what I was just about to say. When it disappears that means you could use it either way.” [Laughter] So there you go.

David: Right. The trick there is you don’t want to click on that because if you click on it it’s an outport on the right side. If you click and drag, you actually drag it, then it works as a side handle. It is tricky.

Anne-Marie: But I love it when that happens, when students teach you.

David: Yes. We need to move on to the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Of the week eek eek. And that is … this was your suggestion, David. And what was it?

David: Go Forward, multiply and Go Back. [Laughter] Go Forward and Go Back, show up in the layout menu in InDesign. But the layout menu has Go Back and Go Forward and almost no InDesign user on the planet uses these features. Why? Because they don’t know what they do. So let’s talk about what they do….

Anne-Marie: Well first you have no idea what that icon is. I’m looking at the shortcut for Go Back, Go Forward. On a Macintosh, I call it the fish skeleton.

David: On Windows it actually says on the menu what it is. It’s Ctrl-Page up or Ctrl-Page down on Windows. On a Mac….

Anne-Marie: It looks like a fish skeleton and it means page up, page down…. not the arrow keys.

David: Yeah. Page up and page down. So Command on the Mac, it’s command page up, command page down. This is Go Back and Go Forward. Now what does that do? Let’s say you’ve got a 10 page document and you’re looking at page three and then you jump to page 10. Right, you just do a command J or control jump in Windows, you jump to the 10th page, end of the document. Now you want to Go Back to three or four or something, you know …

Anne-Marie: Page 3.

David: I don’t remember …

Anne-Marie: 3.

David: It doesn’t matter because I don’t have to remember that I was on page 3, I just want to Go Back to where I was.

Anne-Marie: Oh! [Laughs] I thought you were asking …

David: So that’s when you use the Go Back feature. Go Back goes back to the previous page where you just were before you were looking at the page you’re currently looking at. It’s exactly like a web browser window. You know, you’re on a web browser, you’re looking at a web page, jump forward to another page, and then you click the Go Back button in your web browser to Go Back to the previous page. That’s exactly the same thing. So it goes back to the previous page you were looking at.

Now you can’t say Go Forward until you Go Back, and this is what really freaks people out. So if you want to toggle between two pages, you just Go Back and then Go Forward and Go Back and Go Forward and so on. So it’s kind of like that button some people have on their television remote controls, you know, return to last channel used. It just kind of goes back forth between two pages. And that is the obscure InDesign feature of the week. Go Back and then Go Forward.

Anne-Marie: Go Back first and then Go Forward.

David: That’s right.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Excellent. Well that’s it for our show today. If you have any question, comments or suggestions for us, just let us know. Leave your voicemail comment at our listener comment line, open 24/7. That’s (206) 888-INDY or (206) 888 4639 or visit indesignsecrets.com or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and….

David: David Blatner. for InDesign Secrets.

[music]

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 024 page.